Soul/Mate

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And now the realization swept over Dorothea: for of course she knew, or must have known. Charles Carpenter was the beneficiary of his wife’s estate as Dorothea had been the beneficiary of Michel’s estate years ago. At the time, she had been too distraught with grief to think about money or to care about her financial situation; at this time, she simply did not want to know.

  Charles said, placatingly, “We can give most of it to charity, in Agnes’ name.”

  Dorothea Deverell knew that for some time, even before the Carpenters’ formal separation, Agnes had been willfully negligent about money, as a way of asserting herself against Charles; her excuse was always that it was her money—she had inherited approximately $2 million at her mother’s death. Her personal checking account was often overdrawn and her record of it unreliable; though she seemed to have little to show for it, she ran up large, frequently unexplained bills on her credit card. “She is trying to drive me mad,” Charles complained, “and she is succeeding.” He was the one in charge of all financial matters, as he was in charge of household matters—the overseeing of workmen, repairmen, the weekly lawn crew during the summer months. One of Agnes’ chronic habits was to lose receipts and even, it seemed, to lose or misplace cash. Like many women who are affluent yet have no work, thus no salaries, of their own, she harbored a curious ambivalence about money in the abstract: clearly she relished its use, as an expression of personal power, while at the same time she disdained it. Her cynicism was not without its lyric side; Dorothea recalled her once saying, at a social gathering, “Money doesn’t buy happiness—but it makes it irrelevant.” Charles Carpenter had visibly winced.

  After Agnes’ death, Charles and his accountant tried gamely to make sense of the woman’s financial records. There were many errors, many missing items, and, dating from the last six weeks of her life, at least one mystery: On March 7, Agnes had made out a check to an individual (or a business) called, simply, “Alvarado,” for $7,000; on April 10, the day of her death, she had made out a check to the same party for $8,500. Charles had no idea who or what “Alvarado” was: a store? an independent money manager or investor? Nor did anyone in the Carpenters’ circle of friends know. “She could not after all have spent fifteen thousand five hundred dollars on alcohol and Valium,” Charles grimly observed.

  But he was satisfied that the mysterious expenditure had nothing to do with his wife’s actual death. For what connection could there possibly have been?

  These matters, and numerous others, Charles Carpenter routinely shared with Dorothea Deverell; as she shared with him, perhaps to a lesser extent, matters pertaining to the Morris T. Brannon Institute. Charles’s mourning for his difficult wife was taking the form of a protracted quarrel with her, which, being wholly one-sided, his-sided, could not fail to yield frustration and anger; this, Dorothea was more than willing to indulge, out of guilty complicity. She might try to comfort her lover in his grief, but she would never have wished to quarrel with it. She foresaw how, as if inevitably, she and Charles Carpenter would become a couple in Lathrup Farms society, even before they were married and living in the same house; as Ginny Weidmann said, they were a “perfect match.”

  Dorothea smiled suddenly, unexpectedly.

  For she was happy.

  Since Colin Asch’s extravagant dinner party in her honor, Dorothea Deverell had been very kindly disposed to her friend Ginny’s young nephew. She invited him to the cocktail reception for a new art exhibit at the Institute and there introduced him to a number of the trustees and members of the Friends—older, well-to-do men and women, for the most part, of the kind socially receptive to the emanations of “youth.” She gave him inscribed copies of her handsome books on Isabel Bishop, Arthur Dove, and Charles Demuth; in lieu of the dinner party she owed them—for this wasn’t after all a period in Dorothea’s life when she felt up to the demands of a dinner party—she invited the Weidmanns and Colin to be her guests at a performance of the visiting New York City Ballet in Boston and took them to dinner beforehand at a restaurant near the theater. More importantly, she suggested to Mr. Morland, who immediately agreed, that Colin Asch be added to the Institute’s payroll as a “consultant for publicity”—as it was, Colin had been helping in a casual, unsystematic way, placing notices for upcoming Institute events in Boston publications and getting local radio and television stations to add such notices to their cultural calendars. “Our office has been mailing out press releases, as they’re called, for years, with a minimum of success,” Dorothea told Colin, mystified. “How is it these people have listened to you?” Colin merely laughed, embarrassed, and said, “I suppose it does require a certain knack. A minor talent for coercion.”

  He was touchingly grateful to Dorothea for adding him to the Institute staff and thanked her repeatedly. “The consulting fee is very modest, I’m afraid,” Dorothea said, pleased that Colin Asch was pleased, “but maybe, one day, we might have enough in the budget for a full-time director of publicity—”

  “Oh, I doubt that I could work here full time,” Colin said quickly. “It’s just, you know, the honor of it. The association. The Morris T. Brannon Institute.” He paused. He smiled his spontaneous sunny smile at Dorothea, which never failed to move her. “But—who knows? I can’t make predictions, in terms of my career. Modeling is a notoriously unpredictable profession.”

  “Modeling?” Dorothea asked, amazed. It was the first she had heard of it.

  It seemed that Colin Asch had quit L. L. Loomis in mid-March; he’d been approached by one of the firm’s clients, Elite Models—“‘Elite Models at Affordable Prices’ is how they advertise themselves”—to sign on with them as a photographer’s model, primarily for men’s fashions. Of course he had not ever envisioned himself as a model since he was rather critical of his appearance, and skeptical too over the very idea of peddling one’s looks on the market.… Though he had not been particularly happy at L. L. Loomis, where his talent and energy were being suppressed, he’d hesitated to leave since a job in public relations might have led to something in artistic design, even in architectural design, someday; but here suddenly was this exclusive modeling agency begging him to give them a chance. So he suffered through a week of terrible indecision; once he had an offer to leave, and an excellent offer at that, everyone at Loomis naturally wanted him to stay—even the supervisor who had been so cold and so transparently jealous of him. “But finally I decided to quit and try my chances at modeling,” he said. “After all, I’m twenty-eight years old and not getting any younger.”

  Dorothea Deverell listened to Colin Asch’s words as she might have listened to the speech of an exotic foreigner or the song of an exotic bird. Surely he was, as canny Howard Morland had said of him, a “golden boy—hardly a member of our modest species.” She did not envy him the adventure of his new profession—the very thought of “peddling” one’s looks in public dismayed her—but she did envy him the brash vitality of youth. And she had no doubt that, if he did not give up too quickly, he might very well succeed.

  Almost apologetically she said, “How meager it must seem, then, to be asked to serve as a consultant for us. The Institute isn’t very glamorous, I’m afraid.”

  Colin Asch fixed her an almost defiant look. “As if, Dorothea, I should be concerned with ‘glamour’!”

  A week later, however, near the end of April, he dropped by Dorothea’s home uninvited to show her his portfolio of photographs. “I just thought, you know, you might be curious,” Colin Asch said. Most of the photographs, he explained, as Dorothea turned the pages slowly, were the property of the agency; the half dozen at the end were the first prints of a “shoot” he’d done the previous week for the fashionable men’s store Tatler & Co. Watching Dorothea’s face, he exuded an innocent, boyish vanity. “It’s weird seeing yourself as an object,” he said. “But I guess it sort of puts things into perspective.”

  Does it? Dorothea wondered.

  She had made them a pot of herbal tea; she’d laid the bulky
portfolio down on the dining room table and was examining the glossy photographs in sequence, thoughtfully, as if they were—as, indeed, perhaps they were—works of art. It was clear that Colin Asch wanted her to contemplate these images of himself as a model, but it was not clear to Dorothea how she was expected to respond. “How striking!” she murmured. “How unusual!” She found herself staring at a photograph of a very blond very arrogant-looking young stranger posed leaning against a Jaguar sports car parked amid the dunes, the point of the photograph being, evidently, the Italian designer’s suit the young man modeled, with exaggerated shoulders and a shin waist and wide lapels. “I don’t think I would recognize you,” Dorothea said, laughing uneasily. “It is you? Colin?”

  “Oh, you’d recognize me, Dorothea,” he said, seriously. “You and I would know each other anywhere.”

  There was the formidable young blond man posing in jodhpurs and a polo shirt that fitted his slender yet muscular torso tightly; there was the young blond man in a fashionable ribbed sweater and blue jeans and running shoes; there, lounging on sunlit stone steps redolent of the Mediterranean (though photographed, surely, in the Boston area), his hair glaringly blond, his eyebrows nearly white, eyes obscured by tinted Polo glasses. In one photograph, over which Dorothea chose not to linger, he was nearly naked—wearing only snugly fitting jockey shorts. In all the photographs Colin Asch seemed far more sinewy, muscular, masculine, than Dorothea would have thought him had she simply envisioned him, summoned an image of him in her mind’s eye. For was he not, still, the waiflike boy who had turned up at the Weidmanns’ house back in November and who had stared so appealingly at Dorothea Deverell? And if he was no longer that boy, what had become of that boy?

  She looked up at Colin Asch, who, standing with a teacup in one hand, his other hand crooked at his waist, elbow akimbo, was looking expectantly at her, and saw that, yes, the young man who stood before her was indeed the iconographic young man of the fashion photographs; he had supplanted entirely the skinny boy with the limp pony tail, the sallow grayish skin. The carnivore had supplanted the vegetarian.

  Unless, she thought, there had never been any vegetarian, from the start. Only the carnivore.

  But these were fleeting, unfocused thoughts, themselves supplanted, in the next instant, by others—for Colin Asch with childlike eagerness seemed actually to be waiting for a judgment of some sort from Dorothea Deverell. “Do you,” he asked, with a gesture toward the portfolio, “do you think I have a future there, Dorothea? Or do you think it’s all some sort of—I don’t know—chimera? It is an exciting life, but it’s tough, too—like, you know, ‘dog eat dog’; you’re in such immediate and continuous competition with other models, I sort of wonder whether my nerves can stand it.”

  Dorothea Deverell said, closing the portfolio carefully, “But it seems you’re more than merely promising, Colin, it looks to me as if you have arrived,” and a moment later wondered at the odd jocular confidence of her remark. Did she mean it? Did she even know what she was talking about? Her professional world was in no way contiguous with that of modeling.

  But it was the reply Colin Asch most avidly wished to hear; his face lit up like a child’s. He said, humbly, “Thank you, Dorothea. For your faith in me. There’s no one whose opinion means more to me than yours, and your—faith in me. I’ll always remember it.”

  So Dorothea could hardly retract her statement, or even qualify it. She said, “Are there other ‘shoots’ planned soon?”

  “The head of the agency told me that too, in effect, what you said, Dorothea,” Colin said thoughtfully. “And the photographers I’ve been working with. ‘Naturally photogenic,’ they’re saying—that’s a sort of buzzword in the profession. Of course, I can hardly take credit for it,” he said, with modest dip of his head, “it’s just an accident of genetics. When I was a schoolboy at Monmouth Academy there was this teacher of mine, he was also the headmaster of the school; he’d say he had faith in me too, could see in my face I had some sort of special destiny and he wanted to guide it, he said, but …” Colin Asch’s voice trailed off dreamily. For several seconds he stood, teacup in hand, staring not at Dorothea Deverell but through her, at a space that excluded her; she felt suddenly, though not for the first time, the fact of his extraordinary loneliness. “But something happened to him, and things changed. It’s such a sad thing in life, isn’t it, Dorothea,” Colin Asch said, frowning severely. “That things change?”

  Dorothea, in whose imagination visions of poor Agnes Carpenter had been dominant for days, since the news of her death two weeks before, said merely, “Yes.”

  “They told me I should get ‘investors’ in my career, ‘shareholders’ to help with expenses,” Colin Asch said suddenly, in a derisory voice. “A top model, you know—the head of the agency thinks I’ll be tops in maybe five, six months—can make a million dollars a year, two million, but there are expenses to begin with, and I have my apartment and my furniture and my car—payments, I mean, rent and insurance and that sort of thing,” he said, speaking quickly, laughing. “I’m just so damned ignorant of that side of life, so helpless, like, you know, an idiot savant or something—Mr. Kreuzer, my teacher, he used to say, ‘All you need, Colin, is someone to take you in hand, someone who loves you’—but, Jesus, Dorothea, I told them I just couldn’t do anything like that!” he said vehemently. “I mean, after all, peddling myself to my friends? I told them no, I refused to do that sort of thing, I’d rather quit right now than—than do that sort of thing.”

  Slowly, almost awkwardly, Colin Asch took up the outsized portfolio and prepared to leave, his movements rather studied; so that Dorothea, ever conscious of her role as—and her limitations as—a hostess, had the distinct impression that her young friend was waiting for—hoping for—an invitation to stay awhile longer. It was Saturday evening; surely so handsome and dashing a young man would not be spending Saturday evening alone? Dorothea felt a pang of guilt, but her evening was taken: given over to Charles Carpenter, for whom she would prepare a meal here at home, in truth the happiest most idyllic sort of evening she could envision, though their conversation would almost surely be centered upon poor Agnes and the ramifications of her death … and Colin Asch, for all the appeal of his boyish loneliness and his young man’s swaggering glamour, simply had no place in it.

  At the door Colin Asch said, as if eerily, and not for the first time, he were capable of reading Dorothea Deverell’s mind, “That was so sudden, wasn’t it?—Mrs. Carpenter’s death the other day.”

  Dorothea said, startled, “Yes—yes, it was.”

  “Did you know her, Dorothea?”

  “Not really. No—not well.”

  “You’re closer to Mr. Carpenter, I guess.”

  “Yes,” Dorothea said uneasily. “Charles and I are quite close. He has been”—and this was vague, fumbling—“involved in activities at the Institute for years. A very cultural man, a—a man who likes to involve himself in cultural things. Though with his job it’s—”

  “Susannah Hunt was telling me Mrs. Carpenter had been an alcoholic for years,” Colin Asch said gravely. “Sort of emotionally unstable? And the Carpenters’ marriage wasn’t, I guess, too happy. They didn’t have any children?”

  “No,” Dorothea said. She would have liked to end the conversation but had no idea how, since Colin Asch was standing with his back to her front door, and the door had not yet been opened. “They didn’t have any children.”

  “That’s a blessing, then,” Colin said. “Though I guess, at their age, the children would be all grown up, mostly. Even out of college.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Susannah was telling me Mrs. Carpenter might have taken an overdose of pills? Like, I mean, on purpose? She’d left some letter or something behind that the police confiscated?”

  “No,” Dorothea said firmly, “there was no letter.”

  “There was no letter?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Colin Asch so
berly pondered this: not disbelieving, merely thoughtful. The brass clamp in his ear—he was wearing it again, after an interim of weeks: fortunately he’d left it off for his own dinner party—flashed rakishly; his punkishly styled hair lifted in tufts from his forehead. He smiled suddenly and said, almost in a whisper, “Mrs. Hunt is the kind of woman, she makes things up, and it isn’t even lying, really, it’s just—fabrication. In fact, you know, she drinks a lot too. I think that’s why she’s going around saying all these things, these sort of unverified things, about the Carpenters—she’s afraid she might end up like Agnes Carpenter.” He paused, nodded, not seeming to see the look of apprehension in Dorothea Deverell’s face, and said, in a derisive dismissal, “Next thing you know, she’ll be telling lies about me.”

  It was a balmy misty day with a palpable taste of spring in the air, so Dorothea accompanied her young friend to the curb, to his car—the black Porsche, low-slung, polished, expensive-looking. (But was that a dent in the rear right fender? And was that a hairline crack in the front windshield?) She wondered if the Porsche belonged, still, to Susannah Hunt, or whether Colin Asch had bought it from her. The peculiar outburst about his finances, about “investors” and “shareholders” in his career—which, discreetly, Dorothea Deverell had seemed not to hear: even should she be inclined to do so, Charles Carpenter would be severely disapproving if she invested in Colin Asch’s modeling career—indicated a concern with money of an extreme kind. (Which did not in fact surprise Dorothea, who had wondered from the start how Colin Asch could afford so luxurious an apartment, with such luxurious furnishings, and such tastes. Surely Susannah Hunt was not supporting him entirely?) Guilt tugged at her like a mild ache; she could of course help Colin out if he was terribly in need of cash but she worried that lending him money would humiliate him and giving him money would insult him. At their luncheon at L’Auberge he had looked as if she’d slapped him when she had merely suggested paying her half of the check.